Two Skins

It begins where it ends. Within the first few paragraphs you know that this is a story of loss and of love. "… yet he was suffused with pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream. … If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong."

In her novella, Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx leads us through the twenty-year relationship between Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist that is at times viscerally sexual, but always emotionally harrowing.

It's a love story where no one says I love you. No one needs to because love for these two men just is. It survives their separation, their marriages, the lives they are forced, or perhaps choose, to lead. And it always takes them back to Brokeback Mountain, the one place where they can shrug off their real lives and rekindle what keeps them going.

"What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger."

But even in the moments of peace, there is something lurking.

"Later that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see or feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they'd never got much further than that. Let be, let be."

The underlying truth is always there – they will never be truly together. But even that doesn't diminish the love they share. Ultimately they are doomed to tragedy, but in that tragedy they are not separated. Ennis visits Jack's parents and while rummaging through Jack's closet.

"The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack's sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he'd thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack's own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one."

For Ennis, who takes them, the shirts are what he had, what he might have had and what he can still cling to.

"About that time, Jack began to appear in his dreams, … And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and relief; the pillows sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets."

It ends where it begins. A love story.

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